


Seeds Blooming Into Flowers

by lisachan



Series: Leoverse [214]
Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:28:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22603966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan
Summary: Sometimes you tie bonds tighter by leaving than you could ever do by staying.
Relationships: Blaine Anderson/Original Male Character(s), Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: Leoverse [214]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/30541
Collections: COWT - Clash Of the Writing Titans/Chronicles Of Words and Trials





	Seeds Blooming Into Flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Branches Stretching To The Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3499985) by [lisachan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan). 



> **WARNING:** This story is a **what if** from the original 'verse. In the canon course of events that followed the beginning of Broken Heart Syndrome, **this has never happened**.  
> This whole 'verse _was_ part of a doomed timeline, as Blaine and Leo were supposed to be divorced in this, but I guess the power of the universe came in between this, and... well, if you've read the previous installment of this universe you already know what happened. This is just Leo's version of the whole mess.  
> Also, last year I said my usual, yearly divorce story (which was actually that previous installment) had come in early, and it was March. Now, this year, it comes even earlier, since it's February. Perhaps I should be worried. Mmm.

When Blaine cheated on him with Cody, Leo thought he would die.

That was because he knew what the consequences of that act would be – that he would never be able to trust him anymore, that he would never be able to ever forgive him – and he couldn’t even think about facing it. He knew there was nothing Blaine could do, nothing he could say, nothing he could ever beg for, that would’ve made him forgive him. And so, facing the possibility of living the rest of his life without him, he thought he would die, because his organism simply wasn’t prepared for a full life without Blaine. 

The worst part about the whole thing was hearing about their shared history, a history he knew nothing about, that he could never even imagine. That tale painted the picture of a man Leo did not know – a man that could not only cheat on him with his ex boyfriend, but that could have met him already in the past, had an affair with him, and chose not to tell him anything about it.

In less than thirty seconds Blaine had been able to shatter all Leo thought he knew about him. That he could never cheat on him. That he could never keep secrets from him. That there was nothing Blaine could do that Leo wouldn’t ultimately be able to forgive him.

All lies. Stories Leo told himself because that’s what he loves to do, tell stories.

And it wasn’t just the act of cheating that broke him, not only that. It was who Blaine had cheated on him with. Cody, of all people. Cody, the only person Leo could’ve possibly let go of Blaine for, back in the day. Cody, the only boy Leo had ever been with that he had chosen not to meet again after he went back with Blaine, for fear that he might lose control of himself and cheat – how ironic. He had chosen to deprive himself for years of the sight of Cody, a sight that, by itself, put him at peace with the universe, to protect Blaine from him cheating. And the moment he let Cody back into his life, it was Blaine who cheated.

Leo had always loved Cody with the blind stubbornness of a madman. It was something he couldn’t control – honestly, when it began, in college, he never thought about controlling it, he didn’t even think he should. Blaine and him were on some sort of heartbreaking break Blaine had imposed on him by coming to visit him less and less over the months and finally stopping answering his phone, and so when he met Cody, and got mesmerized by his baby blue eyes, he didn’t even think he should take a moment to think it over and possibly choose not to let himself be too wrapped up in him. He went with the flow, followed the scent of him, a scent only he could smell, he hunted him like a hunter hunts his prey, and when he finally caught him he clung to him and let himself just fall in love.

It felt good. Amazing, actually. Cody was gorgeous, every detail of him, from his silky hair to his smooth skin, from his shy answers to his long silences passing by his rare and ringing laughter.

It wasn’t so much that Leo loved his flaws as much as he loved his qualities. It was that Cody was just all qualities to him, no flaws. He was perfect, much more perfect than Blaine ever was or could ever be, and that was because Cody was plasticine in his hands, something without a definite shape that he could mold into whatever he wanted, while Blaine was all hard stone already, shaped by years and history, unmovable, the Stonehenge of his constant lovesickness. There was no changing Blaine, there was only being changed by him, dramatically and permanently.

Cody was different. He was soft. He was warm. Fucking gorgeous too, which didn’t hurt. Whenever he gravitated around him, Leo lost his mind. He had to have him, constantly. And it wasn’t just something connected strictly to sex, he needed him close in a broader way. He needed him by his side, he needed to touch him, to breathe him in, just because knowing he was alive, and around him, and his own, made him feel better.

A love like this can become ad addiction, and it did, with him.

So much that when he finally got back with Blaine he saw no other option than to cut off all ties with him. Because he knew it – he just knew it: had Cody kept being around, eventually Leo would’ve wanted him again. He would’ve touched him. He would’ve kissed him. He would’ve fucked him. He would’ve cheated on Blaine with him.

And that was probably one of the main reasons why it hurt so bad to learn Blaine had cheated on him with Cody. Because he himself had taken a huge part of his own soul and had cast it away not to ever risk hurting Blaine like that. While Blaine – he had just done it. 

He still remembers the words Blaine used to say it. A Saturday morning, barely a few days after their wedding – the very reason why Cody had come visiting them, he was a guest at the ceremony. “I need to tell you something,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

He had apologized before even saying what he was apologizing for. That was how Leo knew he was about to say something tragic, and he prepared for the worst, but nothing could’ve ever prepared him for something like that.

They had met in New York City, eons before. Leo was still in Lima, at the time, temporarily affianced with Meredith. Blaine was alone and working constantly. Cody was alone and in desperate need of human connection. They had met halfway on a beach in Coney Island and something had sparked between them, something that was probably just a different kind of love, that kind of love that rhymes with the name of a person you share a huge bit of past with.

Their shared bit of past was him, Leo. He had brought them together, without knowing, without wanting. He was the reason they connected for the first time. But he was not the reason why, upon meeting each other again when Blaine went to fetch him at the airport a few days before the wedding, they had connected again. That had to do with them and only them.

Cody was an unresolved enigma in Blaine’s life. They had spent weeks of pure bliss in New York, getting closer than Blaine could ever think he would have a chance to get close to someone again after Leo, and then, one day, as suddenly as he had appeared in the crowd during one of his shows, Cody had disappeared. No reasons, no goodbye. Not even a text.

Blaine had never heard from him again, and his sudden absence had left an empty spot in his chest. A spot that could only grow in time. While, on the other side of the world, Cody tried to build a new life for himself, running from a past that wouldn’t stop haunting him. He had had his heart broken in half by Leo, and he couldn’t bear the thought that Blaine could tear it apart again when he would have inevitably gotten back with Leo, at some point. Cody was sure that would happen, and he had chosen to withdraw himself from the competition before the match could even start. He wouldn’t come in between their relationship anymore, he wouldn’t be a casualty in their merciless war again. Before it could happen, he had run away.

Sometimes you tie bonds tighter by leaving than you could ever do by staying. That’s what his relationship with Blaine taught Leo, over the years, and that applies for Cody too. Breaking up with him, Leo had cemented their college love in their hearts forever. Breaking up with Blaine, Cody had cemented their New York affair in their souls for the rest of time. And then, causing the breakup with Leo, Blaine had finally closed the circle. Now all of them were bound together for eternity. And it fucking hurt.

It was quite a few months of hell, after Blaine moved out and before the divorce. Going through the paperwork, speaking to the attorney, writing that damn document. Leo always believed in the power of writing, of putting things in black and white down on a piece of virtual or physical paper. Nothing makes things come alive quite like writing about them. It was true when he was a grumpy teenager who wrote fanfics and roleplay sessions with his friends about his favorite comics and characters, it became even truer when he started writing his own novels, and it proved unfortunately to be true in the most painful of ways when he went back home with that awful divorce settlement.

That night he sat down on the oversize couch of that oversize sitting room in the oversize house Blaine had bought for them only a few years before, and he read that piece of paper top to bottom twice, all words coming into view clearly, forming phrases and sentences that made tragic sense. The rules that would’ve regulated his life since that moment on.

Who would the children live with primarily. Who would get the house. How would they split the assets. Alimony. Visiting days and hours. The wreckage of their blitzkrieg marriage.

For months he couldn’t even think about rebuilding anything, starting from those ruins. He walked through the house as he’d have walked through a ghost village in the aftermath of a war. Nothing made sense about those walls, their color, the rooms disposition, the furniture. All things Blaine had decided, arrangements he had overseen personally. That precise shade of paint color. That specific furnishing style. The decorative objects he had ordered precisely to fill the gaps between the ones he brought over from the previous, smaller house.

That house wasn’t a home, it was the skeleton of the corpse of their relationship. It felt horrible to even wake up in it, in that bed that they had shared for years, like a sick joke life kept telling him expecting him to laugh when he just wanted to cry.

Then those months passed. Rage subsided and he couldn’t rely on it to sustain himself any longer. There came grief. Nostalgia. Suddenly he was missing Blaine like a dead person. He would wake up thinking he had killed him just because it had been him who had decided they shouldn’t meet anymore, not even when the kids moved to Blaine’s new place, the house he shared with Cody, for the weekends.

He suffered silently for weeks, then surrendered and decided to drive the kids to the house himself. There he had met Blaine again for the first time since seeing him walk out first of the attorney’s office, and he had felt something inside melt. All the hardness around him, all the walls he had put up trying to keep his vulnerable, sore softness protected. He found himself in his arms, he couldn’t even say how. He found himself diving deep in Blaine’s scent, clinging to him, feeling his lips on his forehead as he softly asked how he had been and told him he had missed him. And for a glorious second, knowing Cody was just there, two steps behind, watching, he had felt triumph and the glory of vengeance in his heart, but then he had stepped back, breaking the hug with Blaine, and he had _seen_ Cody, his pain-stricken eyes, how pale and small he looked standing away from them, and most of all the sense of longing and desire spreading from his whole body, and he had realized something he had never thought of during those long months of seclusion.

That neither Blaine nor Cody were happy.

That he had been both of them’s first love.

That they loved each other, but they loved him too.

That Blaine would never stop looking at him like the person who had opened his eyes and heart to a life of fulfillment and happiness.

And that Cody would never, not even now that he lived together with one of the most handsome, caring and mesmerizing men in the whole world, stop wanting him.

That knowledge was shocking, uncomfortable, a damnation and a blessing. Coming to understand that had changed everything, shaking the foundations of the world of nothing and dust where he had been hiding up to that moment.

There was no hiding anymore, not after that.

So that was why he started hanging out with them again. He started organizing the parties, taking any possible chance life gave him – birthdays, anniversaries, any kind of success a member of the family or even a friend could come to realize, from Adam’s first solo exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art to Harper’s last gold star in class – as an excuse to bring them all together. He started seeing Cody alone. It was a dangerous thread to walk, suspended a thousand feet off the ground with no safety net underneath, but he had to. In the park, sipping coffee at Starbucks, in the little cafe close to the offices of the small publishing house Cody worked for, drawing pictures for children’s books.

It felt damn good to be close to him again. Cody barely ever looked at him in his eyes, guilt and shame for what had happened preventing him to feel at ease around him, but he felt exactly like he felt in college, shy and somewhat distant, a constant invitation to wrap a rope around his waist to pull him back closer. He spoke sweetly, he apologized a lot, he combed his long hair behind his ears and every time Leo stared at the graceful movement of his delicate wrist and thought about biting it, but he never did. That would’ve been a whole new level of complication he wasn’t yet ready for.

Then he started meeting Blaine too. He started inviting him in when he came around to pick the kids up. He started calling him, and they spent hours over the phone, talking about the stupidest things. Blaine touched him rarely but when he did he did it passionately, his hands heavy, as though, through that heaviness, he wanted to communicate to Leo just how much he was missing him. 

Meanwhile, life went on. Blaine and Cody were still together and Leo slowly came to realize that they will forever be. Baby Lisbeth was born. The family expanded. Timmy grew up, he tied the tightest of bonds with Alex, things kept changing all around them, and yet Leo kept stealing all those little crumbs off them, whenever he could, even though he knew he shouldn’t have.

At some point a few months ago it became clear that they were heading towards something that could’ve turned into something glorious, or a disaster. It was Cody, weirdly enough, who took the first step. One night, while the kids were all at Blaine’s, Timmy included, he just showed up at Leo’s door, unexpected, unannounced and completely soaked. There was a desperate storm outside, it seemed as though the sky had decided to melt on the world in black ink.

Leo let him in, his heart beating faster. He was sure something horrible was going to happen. Something huge and life changing. Something inescapable, too.

Standing nervously on his feet, Cody had asked for a cup of hot cocoa. Leo had gestured him towards the couch and Cody had sat down there nervously while, equally nervously, Leo hid into the kitchen to prepare what he had asked for. 

He had come back a few minutes later, a cup of hot cocoa in one hand, a plate full of chocolate chips cookies he himself had baked in the other. Cody was sitting on the edge of the couch, as though ready to jump up upon seeing him. He hadn’t moved, though, and Leo had sat next to him, placing the food on the coffee table.

“You look nervous,” he had said after a few seconds of tense silence, “What’s going on?”

Cody had never answered that question with words. He just threw his arms around Leo’s neck and kissed him.

Leo would’ve expected to have more chances to end up buried by the roof of his house after a sudden earthquake.

Cody had moved away from his lips with a soft, barely wet smacking sound, and then had moistened his own lips with his little pink tongue, and Leo had looked at him the whole time, hypnotized. He had swallowed and touched his own mouth, he had sucked at his own lips tasting Cody on them, and then he had extended his hand towards him, he had grabbed him hard by the back of his neck, pulling him closer, clashing against him, kissing him like the end of the world was about to come soon. He had overpowered him, overwhelmed him, he had pushed him down on the couch, underneath himself. He had covered his whole body with his own, he had kissed him voraciously for minutes, tasting him, teasing him, torturing him with bites and tiny laps until he had heard him moan desperately and grow hard against his own thigh. Only then he had stopped.

“...I can’t believe it,” he had whispered right after the kiss had died down on its own, speaking softly against his lips, “What have we done?”

Cody had held his breath for the shortest second. Then he had pecked him on his lips again and had rubbed the tip of his teeny tiny nose against Leo’s. “It was either I did that, or I’d have cut my own wrists again,” he said, his voice raw, honest and clear.

Leo had swallowed hard. “I never stopped loving you,” he had admitted weakly.

Cody had buried his face in the curve of his neck. “I never stopped being yours,” he had whimpered. And then, in an urgent movement, he had pushed Leo’s sweatpants down his hips.

They had the hottest sex, that night. Furious, relentless. Every time they came they gave themselves a few minutes and immediately they were at it again. Leo drank Cody’s orgasm like water from a fountain, Cody rode him with a strength Leo didn’t even know he possessed. Cody stayed the night, and the day after he begged Leo to come to Blaine’s place with him. He held his hands and tugged at it and said whatever it was that they had up to that night was over, something new had come to life, and Blaine needed to know it, Blaine needed to be a part of it.

“He’s never going to accept it,” Leo had said, blinking rapidly, even though he himself didn’t believe that. Blaine would’ve accepted anything, that was obvious. He was as ready for everything as any man could be. He had been born that way. 

Cody had stopped halfway, standing in front of him. He war wearing one of Leo’s t-shirt and a pair of Timmy’s oldest and most worn out jeans, held up by one of Blaine’s belts, which, God knows why, was still there. He was the picture of perfection and just looking at him Leo felt like he could pass through anything to hold him one more time.

“I won’t be your lover again, Leo,” Cody said, “I won’t be the lover of either of you anymore. So you come with me, now, to him, or I walk.”

Leo remembers thinking he had never heard him more determined. So he followed him.

Now from that rainy day to this sunny day that sees him waking up in the middle of a bed that doesn’t belong to him, Blaine by his side on the left, Cody by his side on the right, both of them with their arms wrapped up around him, a few weeks have passed. A few awkward weeks during which they’ve walked on glass, kissed tentatively one on one or in groups of three when they knew no one was watching, held hands secretly while saying goodbye, hugged with a new strength in the secret moments they could steal out of a daily routine that, since it involves kids and very unstable teenagers, should be kept as boring and unchanging as possible.

Something changed tonight. Tonight, while Leo was about to say goodbye and go back home, Blaine held his hand and didn’t let it go. He exchanged a silent look with Cody and Cody came to him and pressed his little pale face against his chest. He whispered _stay, please_ against his black and white sweater, and then Blaine came closer too, he pressed his lips against his curls and whispered _stay_ himself, and what was Leo even supposed to do, what could he even possibly do?

He stayed.

He turns to his right and watched Cody sleep peacefully for a few moments. Then he turns to his left and Blaine is already awake, of course, smiling at him with that smile that he acquired after the divorce and has never left him since, that sad, nostalgic, old smile that makes him look a little more mature than he ever looked before.

“Good morning,” Blaine says, leaning in to kiss him on his lips.

Leo doesn’t answer right away. He takes a few seconds to listen to the silence, the one around him, the one inside him, and recognizes the sound of his peace of mind.

Then he smiles. “Good morning,” he finally says.

As he moves closer to Blaine for a warmer hug, he vaguely thinks that it’s going to be a nightmare to explain this to the kids.

Then he realizes it’s definitely worth it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Flowers Turning Into Fruits](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22836424) by [lisachan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan)




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